Cruel Futures: City Lights Spotlight No. 17 by Carmen Gimenez Smith (English) Pa

Description: Cruel Futures by Carmen Gimenez Smith A Latina feminist State of the Union address at the intersection of pop culture and interiority. FORMAT Paperback LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Publisher Description Cruel Futures is a witchy confessional and wildly imagistic volume that examines subjects as divergent as Alzheimers, Medusa, mumblecore, and mental illness in sharp-witted, taut poems dense with song. Chronicling life on an endangered planet, in a country on the precipice of profound change compelled by a media machine that produces our realities, the book is a high-energy analysis of popular culture, as well as an exploration of the many social roles that women occupy as mother, daughter, lover, and the resulting struggle to maintain personhood-all in a late capitalist America.Praise for Cruel Futures:"Gimenez Smith seeks release from the pressures of societal expectations in this collection of brief yet powerful poems. ... Gimenez Smiths crisp lyrics and imagery highlight ever-present threats to female personhood and autonomy."-Publishers Weekly"Cruel Futures is one of those rare books, rare pieces of art, that manages to be extremely intimate, vulnerable and close while also doing a kind of searing cultural critique. The poems can be tender or ironic, and sometimes a blending of the two, which is not easy."-Ross Gay"In the body, through the lyric, and twitching with every sense of the word nerve, this book sings a mongrel nation into and across its cruel futures. Like Neruda in his Plenos Poderes/Full Powers, Gimenez Smith has all the mastery she needs to cast a cold eye on her positioning, and ours. In this way Cruel Futures is an autobiography that wont stay in its genre or premise, caring less to author a self than to follow turns of magic in words that might soothe our collisions with the living."-Farid Matuk"Declamatory anthems to no nation, these songs stride as they deal and wheel with skin and kin: history, catastrophe, the body, love. Upturned and defiant, all types of shade, no outskirt, / vital like a saint, the poems in Cruel Futures shimmer with Gimenez Smiths lyric attention: full of grit, sharp and knowing."-Hoa Nguyen Author Biography Carmen Gimenez Smith received a BA in English at San Jose State University and an MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop. She is the author of four poetry collections, including Milk and Filth, a finalist for the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry. She was awarded an American Book Award for her memoir Bring Down the Little Birds (2010) and the Juniper Prize for Poetry for Goodbye, Flicker (2012). She also co-edited Angels of the Americlypse: New Latin@ Writing (2014), an anthology of contemporary Latinx writing. Be Recorder will be published by Graywolf Press in 2019. She now serves on the planning committee for CantoMundo and on the board of RASA, which sponsors the Thinking Its Presence conference on race and art. She serves as the publisher of Noemi Press. She is a professor of creative writing at Virginia Tech and the poetry editor for The Nation. Review "Giménez Smiths poems in Cruel Futures continue the work of truth telling that she established in her previous collections. She reminds us that our cruel pasts will lead to cruel futures, that the garbage weve consumed from television and the non-stop media cycle will color and pollute our perceptions. But in looking unflinchingly at the broken remains of the public and the personal, she also assures us that there is something to be built from the rubble. Whether she is speaking as the quick-witted badass who has a machete and a hot head or the thoughtful friend who has walked / alongside your life without judgment, you want her in your corner."—Boston Review"Giménez Smith seeks release from the pressures of societal expectations in this collection of brief yet powerful poems. She depicts the myriad ways that a womans sense of self is at the mercy of assigned gender roles. … She links the concept of becoming a monster to womens defiance of prescribed roles, their need to break out of which makes them dangerous … Cultural phenomena such as marriage and television come under scrutiny, and she handles mental illness issues with great care, particularly bipolar disorder and dementia. Giménez Smiths crisp lyrics and imagery highlight ever-present threats to female personhood and autonomy."—Publishers Weekly"In Carmen Giménez Smiths Cruel Futures, its clear she is not interested in the kind of static attention one associates with William Wordsworths definition of poetry as emotion recollected in tranquillity. Instead Giménez Smith has places to go and then to take off from again, in the form, mainly, of social and political critiques. Although her poems achieve a certain velocity, she still manages to delve into volcanic meaning and bask in the mirror of self-reflection. To truly relish her talent is to understand her intellect as one of those plasma balls that lights up with bolts of electricity when ones hand touches it. The speakers in her poems are charming, self-deprecating, humorous, and awed, especially when they portray what life is like as a mother, a wife, an artist, and a consumer of popular culture and literature. Because Giménez Smith experiments with a thicker set of references and inferential imagery than most, poems such as Of Property, As Body, and Ravers Having Babies seem to outpace whatever triggered their origin, and she almost always arrives at pure lyric possession."—Major Jackson, American Poets"Though the world of Giménez Smiths poems is late-capitalist America, its striking to see how much of an apocalyptic quality the collection has. hellip; Giménez Smiths speaker challenges us to consider that we have certain notions of both sex and gender based on age, that women of a certain age feel "terror" when confronting their own femininity. … the collection urges us to be proactive in confronting these harmful notions."—Dorothy Chan, The Cincinnati Review"Cruel Futures is irresistible in its candid, spicy, ceaselessly surprising, totally unashamed self- shaming. I want no window into me, not even pores, she writes, but her poetry is loud with flung-open shutters and windows. … Giménez Smith is so spirited that she would be anybodys hero excepting perhaps her more assimilated children, whose doubts of her she writes about with hilarious honesty. She is at once vulnerable and fearless, full of fun, a headlong, natural performer. Exaggeration is her muse. The writing could equally be described as poetry and cut-up scrappy prose; but it escapes the low pressure and general disesteem of the latter through panicky pacing, an edgy breathlessness that remembers terrors and hurts. … The disregard of gracefulness, the knocking roughness here as throughout, agrees with the no-bullshit temper of the times. I find that it is itself a tricky form of grace, of elegance and poise. Everything Giménez Smith writes compels attention …"—Lana Turner"[I]ts Smiths control of the line, the lyric, her use of compression, wry humor, and pointed candor that makes the books captivation one that truly endures. She delves into familial issues: child-rearing, sick or aging parents, and mental health with care and magnanimous transparency. Cruel Futures is an insurmountable labor that Smith has carved from a world of grief, but retains love and humor that renders her devotion a masterpiece."—The Arkansas International"[Giménez Smiths] new collection that explores the intersections of her various identities and the contrasts between the roles she plays and has played at stages in her life. These poems are rooted in the daily details of her life, and hold a tangible immediacy and frankness that departs from the abstractions of her 2013 collection Milk & Filth. … There is tremendous power in Cruel Futures, a collection both supple in its vulnerabilities and firm in its defenses. Carmen Giménez Smith has survived her own story, and she has ensured her children have survived their own thus far. The books tension comes from her awareness that her power to continue to ensure that survival is evaporating from her hands, reconstituting in their own."—David Nilsen, The Bind"Media distortion, mental illness, trauma, and oppression are among the fixations of this splendid, fierce, and essential new book by Carmen Giménez Smith, who shrewdly documents a womans passage into and through these crucibles. … Giménez Smiths self-inquiry drills down relentlessly until it reaches central, molten truths."—Marietta Brill, The Adirondack ReviewCruel Futures is an astonishingly present imagistic exploration of aging, familial bonds, and mothering in the context of late capitalism. Giménez Smiths poems, sparkling with pop culture and gleaming with intelligence, unpretentiously welcome the reader into mortality, grief, and nurturing, while deftly highlighting how these human conditions are shaped by the race, gender, and class of those who experience them."—Luiza Flynn-Goodlett, The Adroit Journal"Cruel Futures is kinder than its title suggests, and steely. … I am so ready to go over this with a teenage relative who is half-Irish, one-quarter-Chinese, one-quarter-Filipina and so much more fabulous than she thinks, despite encouragement from loved ones and teachers. It goes without saying, though sometimes Giménez Smith thinks she has to, that this poem, this writer, this girl are all deeply American. This is vital language for our time."—The Rumpus Review Quote "Gim Excerpt from Book 5 poems from Cruel Futures DEFAULT MESSAGE I have thirty seconds to convince you that when Im not home, my verve is still online or if Im sleeping when you call, sheep are grazing on yesterdays melodrama. Does anybody know what the burning umbrella really meant? Forget it. Tell me what you need. Leave me a map. Leave me your net worth for reference. Better yet, leave me more than you ever planned. Frankly, Im anxious your message will be a series of blurs, that youll garble your confession, so I retract every last gesture for your same retraction. The phone is in the kitchen, but Ive lost my way. VOW RENEWAL I was afraid for our little nuclear family since we is a delicate tentacled organism stretching a thousand light years, a vortex, an oil spill titanic and also the bobbing four-person submarine navigating it. Once I feared youd eat through me with your eyess wet mouth, so I held you at arms length. My anxiety bolstered your will, and something like that is this marriage. Anger in women is not a negative emotion you said when I was trying to implode against the flint of your body. My cock got hard when you said that. Id been waiting for you since I was primordial. Heres to another 100 years, my love, and heres to our upload onto the same big network. We becomes a poly-symbiotic life form that eludes eternity and also occupies self with the stink we make of our sloped marital bed. RAVERS HAVING BABIES Ive tried to make my babies fall in love with the surrealists, but they only want the acid pastels of the graphic age. I gather their utterances in my viscous cloud and echo them back in art because theyre brilliant about tomorrow. Im old to them and this will be true until they are this old too, remembering how their mother had been relatively young and human or maybe they do not think of my mortality at all. Were not there yet. Were at the place where Im a threat because of everyone suddenly seeing them with such acuity, their status perpetually in flux. Each depiction and turn of a phrase is under scrutiny and the hopelessness of correction.... Now I puzzle, I perplex, I embarrass. Then theyre the world seeing me--how much Ive always hated inspection myself-- which amplifies their power but also those selves of theirs that are starting to feel set, inescapable. Some nights, left alone in their mind, dreams complicating their mortality, the children wander into my bed for the harbor in my body. I inhale them in old school want, and recall a more desperate version of myself in love. That woman was all in, all hunger, all vision of unity, and all this life later, through therapy and letting go and also doing some broken things, that woman figured out she only wanted the long devotion of family. Not to replicate childhood, but to replace it. Oh, terrible childhood, what tatters you made of me. In seeking love, I thought little of outcome, only the reaping I would do. The open windows closed. The solutions. Instead: disparate wants and strangers connected by blood. Both times I was pregnant I worried about becoming full of them too fast, or that they would smother me with want when in fact, it had been me, insinuating my cells into them. Theres uncanniness in their adolescence because mine is there floating between us. I was a frantic and edgy teen. I constructed so many urgencies. I had a fantasy of being left alone in the world only to set it right. My other devotion is the world, who demands I tell it. Song keeps me fixed to the page. At the end of my second pregnancy, I went into what they called false labor, exploding supernova of urgency that became my only type of consciousness, masochist psychonaut, but it wasnt time, not for two weeks, though I felt my child becoming herself, insistent storm, someone like the now-girl in the room down the hall, and then I felt it when it would really happen, which was different than before, more of an awareness of a legitimate beginning to labor, to the relationship we would have, really, and there was too, an ending I felt there because life would always be linked to death. That was the last time I was certain must be why Im recalling it, certain of what I needed to do to retain them. That must have been what love ended up being in the long run in order for me to use it. While my babies sleep Im furled into a ball softened by sugar and weed, trying to solve problems. I lay in dread until morning when they tarry over TV and time shortens our telemeres without mercy. Theyre just figuring out they pinned their fortunes to someone whos a little messy, a little loud. Theyre coming to terms with the terms. Ill die before identifying a single birdsong in my life, but ink drips music into my blood. The imaginary is marvel. A minute inverts my babies away from me. So much to do, so little skin for transformation. BEASTS My siblings and I archive the blanks in my mothers memory, diagnose her in text messages. And so it begins, I write although her disease had no true beginning, only a gradual peeling away until she was left a live wire of disquiet. We frame her illness as a conceptual resistance--She thinks, yet she is an other-- to make sense of the alteration. She forgot my brothers cancer, for example, and her shock, which registered as surprise, was the reaction to any story we told her, an apogee of sublimity over and over. Once on a walk she told us she thought she was getting better. Exhausted, we told her she was incurable, a childs revenge. The flash of sorrow was tempered only by her forgetting and new talk of a remedy, and we continued with the fiction because darker dwindling awaits us like rage, suspicion, delusion, estrangement. I had once told myself a different story about us. In it she was a living marble goddess in my house watching over my children and me. So what a bitter fruit for us to share, our hands sinking into its fetid bruise, the harsh flavor stretched over all our days, coloring them grey, infesting them with the beasts that disappeared her, beasts that hid her mail in shoeboxes under her bed, bills unpaid for months, boxes to their brims. The lesson: memory, which once seemed impermeable, had always been a muslin, spilling the self out like water, so that one became a new species of na Description for Sales People Carmen Gim Details ISBN0872867587 Pages 88 Publisher City Lights Books Series City Lights Spotlight Year 2018 ISBN-10 0872867587 ISBN-13 9780872867581 Short Title Cruel Futures Language English Format Paperback Subtitle City Lights Spotlight No. 17 Imprint City Lights Books Place of Publication Monroe, OR Country of Publication United States NZ Release Date 2018-05-10 US Release Date 2018-05-10 Publication Date 2018-05-10 UK Release Date 2018-05-10 DEWEY 811.6 Audience General AU Release Date 2018-07-02 Illustrations Illustrations Author Carmen Gimenez Smith We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. With fast shipping, low prices, friendly service and well over a million items - you're bound to find what you want, at a price you'll love! TheNile_Item_ID:119936021;

Price: 39.4 AUD

Location: Melbourne

End Time: 2025-01-10T03:42:31.000Z

Shipping Cost: 0 AUD